Since its first
publication in 2008, the Smashwords Book Marketing Guide has
helped thousands of writers, publishers and book marketers reach
millions of new readers. The first edition aimed to help Smashwords
authors take full advantage of the marketing tools and capabilities
of the Smashwords platform.

In the years since,
I’ve expanded the scope of the guide with dozens of updates as the
industry developed, and as I identified new book marketing
opportunities for authors. Today the Smashwords Book Marketing
Guide has evolved to become an essential resource for all authors
and publishers, even if you’re not yet working with Smashwords.

Most of the ideas
presented here cost nothing to implement other than the investment of
your time.

Some of my tips require
only a couple of minutes to implement; yet will reap you dividends
for years to come. Other tips require a greater ongoing investment
of your time and attention. Do the easy things first, and then refer
back to the guide as a brainstorming checklist whenever you’re
ready to do more.

You’ll find I use the
terms “self-published author” and “indie author”
interchangeably. They’re the same.

Although this book
focuses on ebook marketing, many of the recommendations I’m about
to share apply to print book and audiobook marketing as well.

This is the 2018
edition of the Smashwords Book Marketing Guide. It’s the
most significant revision yet. It’s been updated with dozens of
new marketing tips and new material to help you master your book
marketing.

I’ve restructured the
order in which I present the tips. They’re now organized in
sections under logical categories that map closer to how you’ll
plan, launch and sustain your book marketing.

I’ve also added a new
chapter titled “Deep Dives,”which offers in-depth sections
for developing your social media strategy, how to work with beta
readers and how to earn free press coverage.

The Smashwords Book
Marketing Guide will continue to evolve over time. Many of the
marketing strategies and tactics you’re about to learn were
pioneered by your fellow indie authors. I welcome your suggestions
for new tips to share in future editions. I also welcome your
corrections. Write me (Mark Coker) at first initial second initial
at smashwords dot com.

Why I wrote this
book

Context is important.
Who am I and how did I come to write a book about book marketing?

I’ve been practicing
marketing my entire career. I received my degree in marketing from
UC Berkeley in 1988, but my best learning has come from real world
experience.

My first job out of
college was as VP of Marketing for my father’s garage startup. He
gave me a big title and zero marketing budget for our little two-man
company. Out of necessity I learned how to get free press coverage
for our software.

My next big job was
working at one of the largest PR firms in Silicon Valley. After a
couple of years there, I left to start my own firm. For over 15
years I ran an award-winning Silicon Valley PR firm where I provided
strategic communications counsel to – and was mentored by – some
of the brightest CEOs and VPs of Marketing from around the globe. It
was an amazing educational experience.

Then around 2000, right
before the dot com bubble burst, I met my wife, Lesleyann. She’s a
former reporter for Soap Opera Weekly Magazine. She told me
head-spinning stories about her experiences reporting on the wild and
wacky world of daytime television soap operas. She shared how the
soap actors she met were more over-the-top in real life than their
fictional soap opera characters. I suggested she write a book about
her experiences. She suggested we write that book together.

Ever since I can
remember, I dreamed of writing a book. I always assumed I’d write
non-fiction about one of my various passions such as gardening,
entrepreneurship, stock market investing, or marketing. But a novel
about soap operas? I decided why not. I was getting burnt out on
the daily grind of running a PR agency and was ready for something
different.

The rest is history. I
took a sabbatical from my PR agency to research and write the novel
with Lesleyann. It was an incredible experience. We explored the
dark underbelly of Hollywood celebrity. The book is titled Boob
Tube.

Despite representation
from an awesome agent at a top literary agency in New York City, we
couldn’t get a publishing deal. Previous novels targeting soap
opera fans had performed poorly, so publishers were reluctant to take
a chance on us.

The experience opened
my eyes. I realized that despite their good intentions, publishers
are unable to say yes to every author.

I imagined the millions
of writers who came before us whose dreams of authorship had been
crushed by the benign neglect of publishers.

I thought it would be
really cool if someone would create a publishing service that could
say yes to every writer in the world. This was in 2005, the early
days of blogging and YouTube. I thought if anyone could have the
freedom to publish a blog post or video online, and have their work
judged by their audience as opposed to a gatekeeper, then why not a
book?

I decided to solve the
problem myself. I wanted to democratize publishing for the benefit
of all writers and readers.

In 2008 I founded an
ebook publishing company called Smashwords. Smashwords makes it
fast, free and easy for any writer, anywhere in the world, to
self-publish an ebook. We created powerful publishing and marketing
tools, and we put these tools in the hands of writers for no cost.

In 2009 we broke down
the distribution barriers by opening up multiple major ebook
retailers to self-published ebooks. Once our authors’ ebooks hit
retailers’ virtual shelves, they started selling. We also opened
up public libraries to self-published ebooks.

In the years since our
founding, Smashwords has grown to become the world’s largest
distributor of self-published ebooks. Throughout our growth and all
the ups and downs of this rough and tumble industry, I never lost
sight of the fighting spirit upon which I founded the company. We’re
here to democratize publishing for the benefit of authors, publishers
and readers. That fight continues.

Today we help over
130,000 authors publish and distribute nearly 500,000 ebooks.

It’s been my
privilege to work with so many bright and amazing authors.

Unlike large
publishers, and unlike my former corporate clients in the tech
industry, indie authors have never enjoyed the luxury of
multi-million dollar marketing budgets.

What indies lack in
money, however, they make up one hundred times over with creativity,
experimentation and grit. In the fight to reach readers, indie
authors pioneered many of the ebook marketing practices I’m about
to share with you.

If you’re a writer,
author, publisher, book marketer, literary agent, or personal
assistant to an author, this guide is for you. I’m here to help
you reach more readers.

What is Book
Marketing?

Book marketing is more
than social media, paid advertising and branded pencils.

Book marketing is
everything you do to make your work and your author brand more
discoverable, more desirable and more enjoyable for your target
reader. This means marketing encompasses everything from book
production and pricing to distribution and promotion. Every decision
you make will have marketing impact.

Smart marketing starts
by understanding your target reader. Who is that reader – more
than any other – who will derive the greatest satisfaction from
your work?

Your target reader
looks to books to satisfy specific emotional and intellectual
aspirations. A reader may desire to laugh, cry, learn, escape,
contemplate, feel happy, feel scared, feel titillated, or all of the
above and more.

Your target reader is a
time traveler with split personalities. Your reader has diverse
tastes. The same reader might desire a political memoir today, a
sweet romance tomorrow, a book on business finance the next day, and
a celebrity biography the day after that.

Your reader is a moving
target. To reach them, your book needs to be in the right place at
the right time with the right message, so the reader is drawn to its
gravitational pull the next time their orbit passes by your book.

Smart book marketing
works like an ever-present magnet to bridge the gap between a
reader’s desire and your book’s ability to satisfy that desire.

Writing is
Marketing

Writing is the most
important form of marketing because it’s how you produce the
product that will satisfy your target reader’s desires.

Your number one
priority as an author is to write a super-awesome book that takes
your readers to an emotionally satisfying extreme. It doesn’t
matter if your book is about real estate investing, political
philosophy or romance. The goal is the same: make the target reader
go WOW!

Great books become
bestsellers when they spread from one reader to another through
word-of-mouth.

Good books aren’t
good enough anymore. There are millions of good books out there, but
only a small number of wow books.

We’ve all read wow
books. They’re the books that stick with us forever. They’re
the books that inspire us, move us or shake us to our core.

Wow books earn five
star reviews. They’re the books readers can’t put down. Wow
books are the books that cause readers to become fans, and fans to
become superfans.

Superfans buy
everything you write. Superfans are your evangelists. They drive
word of mouth. They’re the readers that will propel your career
forward for decades to come.

Of all your marketing
tasks, organize your day to protect and maximize your writing time.
Think of your book as the cake. The marketing recommendations in
this book are the icing on the cake.

Now let’s turn our
attention to the market environment in which you participate. Once
you have a lay of the land, you can pursue your marketing campaigns
with greater success.

The Rise of eBooks

In 2008 when I launched
Smashwords, ebooks accounted for less than one percent of the overall
trade book market (so-called “trade books,” if you’re not
familiar with the term, are the books consumers purchase in both
physical and online book stores).

Today ebooks account
for around 25% of overall trade book sales. In genre fiction, ebooks
command a larger share.

Since ebooks are priced
lower than print books, this 25% market share understates the
dramatic shift to digital reading that has occurred over the last
decade. From a unit market share perspective, the percentage of
words read digitally as ebooks vs. print is probably near or above
50%.

If you want to reach
more readers, make ebooks central to your publishing strategy.

Although 75% of trade
book sales are still in print, the print market is dominated by
traditional publishers. Traditional publishers still control access
to physical brick and mortar bookstores. This means that with rare
exception, print distribution to physical stores is not an option for
most self-published authors.

With ebooks, however,
it’s a different story. With ebooks, the shelf space is virtual.
Every major ebook retailer wants to carry every self-published ebook.
This means your ebook will appear alongside the ebooks published by
major publishers. Your ebook, like all ebooks, can occupy that
virtual shelf forever, even if your sales are low.

This means your books
have the potential to generate an annuity stream of income for you
and your heirs for many years to come.

The
Competitive Advantage of Indie Ebook Authors

In the digital realm,
indie ebook authors enjoy numerous competitive advantages over
traditional publishers. You enjoy faster time to market, complete
creative control and total promotional flexibility. You control all
of your rights and you have the ability to price lower while earning
higher royalty rates.

How much higher are the
royalties? Authors who work with large traditional publishers
typically earn only 12-17% of the ebook’s list price as their
royalty, or 11-15% after their agent earns their cut.

Indie ebook authors, by
contrast, earn 60-80% of the list price as their royalty. That’s
about five times higher.

To put these royalties
in practical terms, it means an indie author can price his or her
ebook at $3.99 and earn about $2.50 for each book sold. A
traditionally published author would earn only 50 to 70 cents at that
price. The traditionally published author would have to have their
ebook priced at over $14.00 to earn the same $2.50 earned by the
indie author at $3.99.

If a reader has the
choice between two books of equal perceived quality, and one is
priced at $3.99 and the other is $13.99, the $3.99 indie ebook has
the advantage. The lower price makes your book more affordable and
more desirable to readers.

Each year I publish an
annual research report called the Smashwords Survey that examines the
impact of book price on an author’s unit sales and overall
earnings. Episode 7 of the Smart
Author Podcast examined the 2017 Smashwords Survey.

For each of the last
several years we’ve found that ebooks of full-length fiction priced
at $3.99, earn as much, if not more, than fiction priced over $10 -
yet the $3.99 price yields three to five times as many unit sales.

Indie authors are
leveraging low prices to build readership faster, and earn more in
the process.

Setting
Expectations

We all find inspiration
from the amazing stories of indie ebook authors who were rejected by
traditional publishers, and then went on to become international
bestsellers after turning to Smashwords and Amazon to self-publish
their ebooks. These rags to riches stories remind us of what’s
possible.

Yet the truth of the
matter is that most books don’t sell well, whether they’re
self-published or traditionally published.

At Smashwords we don’t
make promises we can’t keep. I can’t promise your book will sell
well, even if you follow all of the tips in the Smashwords Book
Marketing Guide. I want you to know the truth, so you can
approach your publishing career with realistic expectations and eyes
wide open. You might labor away in obscurity for years before your
book breaks out. Or you may never break out.

A new ebook published
today will compete against over five million other ebooks already in
ebook stores.

There’s a glut of
high-quality low-cost ebooks on the market. Hundreds of thousands of
new titles come to market each year from traditional publishers and
indie authors alike.

Readers turn to books
for entertainment, escapism and knowledge. Yet other media forms are
competing for your reader’s attention. Witness the amount of time
your target readers also spend enjoying social media, television,
movies, sports, video games, and podcasts.

The good news is that
your book is unique. Since ebooks never go out of print, your book
is immortal. It can forever occupy that valuable shelf space.

This permanence is a
mixed blessing.

On the positive side,
it means your book is forever discoverable and purchasable. On the
negative side, it means your competition will increase every day and
every year from this day forward.

Smart marketing will
help your book rise above the clutter to become more visible, more
findable and more desirable to your readers.

The skills you learn in
the Smashwords Book Marketing Guide will make you a more
successful author. That success won’t come overnight. Instead,
it’ll come in small increments over time as you learn to adopt,
implement and refine the recommendations I’m about to share.

Marketing is a core
competency every author must learn. Even traditionally published
authors often complain they don’t get enough marketing support from
their publisher. This is because publishers cannot sustain the
marketing after a book is released. Unless an author’s book sells
well right out of the gate, publishers need to shift their marketing
resources and attention to the next new releases by other authors.

Successful authors,
whether they’re traditionally published or self-published, must
learn to drive their own marketing.

No publisher will ever
share the same lifelong passion for your book as you. It’s your
baby. You’re the one who dreams about your book every night. You
spend your shower time, your drive time and every other waking moment
thinking about your book.

Bottom line, you are
your book’s best advocate and best marketer.

In Chapter 1, I’ll
provide an overview of the marketing tools at Smashwords, and then in
Chapter 2, we’ll dive into my checklist of 65 book marketing tips.

Chapter 1 -
The Free Book Marketing Tools at Smashwords

Smashwords is a free
ebook publishing platform available to all writers.

To publish with
Smashwords, you sign up for a free account at Smashwords.com and then
follow the step-by-step instructions that come in your confirmation
email.

Once your book is
published at Smashwords, we review it to confirm it meets the
distribution requirements of our retailers and library partners.
These requirements are mostly mechanical and legal in nature.
Assuming you followed our simple publishing instructions, we approve
the book for distribution and then we digitally transmit your ebook
to the retailers and libraries.

Within minutes of
upload to Smashwords, you can start utilizing the marketing tools I’m
about to describe one by one:

1. Distribution to
Retailers and Libraries

Broad distribution is
one of the most important components of your marketing plan. If your
book isn’t available in bookstores and at libraries, it’s not
discoverable by readers. All online retailers and most libraries
carry self-published ebooks.

How do you get your
book to these sales outlets? The fastest and simplest route is to
partner with a distributor like Smashwords. With a single upload to
Smashwords, we’ll distribute your ebook to major retailers such as
Apple iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Scribd. We’ll also
make it purchasable by over 30,000 public libraries around the world
via our distribution to library ebook platforms OverDrive, Baker &
Taylor Axis 360, Bibliotheca CloudLibrary, Gardners, and Odilo.

We make it easy for you
to manage your book across multiple sales channels. If you want to
change your price or update your book description or upload a new
cover image, you update your book once at Smashwords. We transmit
the update to all the sales channels we serve. It’s not uncommon
that you’ll make a price change at Smashwords and see it reflected
at iBooks or Kobo within an hour or two.

There’s no cost to
distribute with Smashwords. Smashwords earns its income on
commission. If your book sells at one of our retailers, the retailer
takes 30% of the list price as their commission, Smashwords earns 10%
list, and the author earns 60% list.

Most Smashwords authors
and publishers derive over 90% of their sales through our global
distribution network, with the remainder earned at the Smashwords
store.

2. The Smashwords Store,
our retail operation

Smashwords is unusual
among ebook distributors, in that we also operate our own small
online retail store.

Within five minutes of
uploading your book to Smashwords, it goes live on the Smashwords
home page and is available for immediate purchase and download by a
worldwide audience.

Millions of readers
pass through our virtual doors each month. We make it easy for
readers to discover books and authors of interest. Some of these
book discovery features include granular category searches,
bestseller lists, highest rated lists, “Other books by this
author,” “Other books in this series,” and “Readers of this
book also read.” Readers can also fine tune their category
searches by book length, price and books that are running special
sales.

The Smashwords store
pays royalties up to 80% list, among the highest in the industry.
Even $.99 ebooks can earn up to 80% list. The royalty is based on
the size of the customer’s shopping cart.

3. Global
Pricing Control

With the Smashwords
Global Pricing Control tool, accessible from your Dashboard, you can
control pricing in 246 countries and in 142 different currencies.
This is helpful for authors who want to carefully control
country-specific pricing and promotions. It’s a popular feature
for authors who run BookBub advertisements, since they need to set
custom pricing across multiple currencies in the US, Canada, UK,
Australia and India.

In Europe, you can even
price your book at different Euro prices in different countries.
This is helpful when you consider that consumers in some Eurozone
countries have widely disparite disposable incomes. A price that’s
affordable in one country might be too expensive in another, even
though the currency is the same. Italy and Spain, for example, have
per capita incomes that are about ½ what they are in Germany and
Spain.

4. Daily
Sales Reporting

When you’re out there
promoting your books, it’s helpful to gain immediate feedback as to
how your marketing campaign is performing. The Daily Sales tool in
the Smashwords Dashboard helps you track, at-a-glance, same-day and
next-day sales results across iBooks, Barnes & Noble, OverDrive
and the Smashwords. Store. You can slice and dice the data, such as
to analyze a specific title’s performance over time at a specific
retailer, or to compare one retailer’s performance to another.

5. Multiple
eBook File Types

You have two options
for delivering your book to Smashwords. You can upload your own
professionally designed epub file, or you can do what the vast
majority of our authors and publishers do – upload a Microsoft Word
document of the manuscript.

When you upload a Word
document to Smashwords, we automatically convert it into five
different ebook file types, including the most popular formats of
.epub, .mobi and PDF. These different file types make your book
accessible and readable to users of any e-reading device. Customers
can purchase the book at Smashwords once, and enjoy it on any of
their personal devices in any format. Some of the many devices
supported include the iPad, iPhone, Kindle, Nook, Kobo Reader,
personal computers, any smart phone, and future devices not even
invented yet.

6. Author
Profile Pages

When you publish with
Smashwords, we create a personal profile page for you with a unique
web address. The Smashwords profile page is powerful. Think of it
as your personal storefront. It automatically lists all of your
published books. You can post your bio and picture, add social media
links to Facebook and Twitter, integrate your external blog, embed
YouTube videos, which I’ll cover in a moment, provide links to
where readers can purchase print versions of your book, and showcase
reviews you’ve written of other Smashwords books.

Your profile page also
helps you forge a closer relationship with readers. Readers can
“favorite” you, which cause links to your profile page to appear
on their profile page. Readers can also subscribe to your Smashwords
Alerts, so they receive an automatic email whenever
you release a new book.

For each book you
publish with Smashwords, we automatically generate a web page
dedicated to that book. You can upload a book cover, upload YouTube
book trailers and add a synopsis and descriptive tags to help readers
find your book. Prospective readers can access samples of your book
in formats readable on any ebook reading device and add your book to
their shopping cart with a click.

8. Book Sampling

Smashwords offers the
most powerful and flexible sampling system you’ll find anywhere.
When you upload your book to Smashwords, you tell us what percentage
of your book we should make available as a free sample in the
Smashwords store. Sampling allows readers to try your book before
they buy. As the author, you determine the sampling percentage, from
word one forward. If, for example, you select 15% sampling, the
first 15% of your book starting at the beginning is available for
free download, so prospective readers can try before they buy. At
the end of the sample we prompt them to purchase the full book.

9. Shopping Cart

We help you sell your
book. We offer a simple to use shopping cart for your readers, and
we make it easy for them to pay via PayPal or any of the most popular
credit cards. Best of all, 85% of the net sales proceeds from your
book go to the person who deserves it most: You, the author or
publisher (70.5% for sales generated from affiliate marketers).
After all, Smashwords was created by an author to help fellow
authors.

10. Book Reviews

Book reviews help sell
books, so we make it easy for your customers to review your books.
Whenever someone buys your book, we send them an automated reminder
to review your book if they enjoyed it.

11. Coupons!

One of the most popular
features at Smashwords is our Coupon Manager tool, which you’ll
find in your Smashwords Dashboard. No other retailer offers anything
similar or so powerful. The Coupon Manager makes it easy to generate
custom coupon codes to promote to the fans on your email list, web
site, blog, social networks, or on printed business cards.

We continue to add new
capabilities to the tool. You can create coupon codes for cents off,
dollars off or a percentage off, and you control the expiration date.
You can also create what we call “metered” coupons where you
control the number of redemptions before the coupon expires. There’s
also the option to make your coupons private or public. With a
private coupon, you control whom you give the code too. With a
public coupon, your special sale price is advertised to customers in
the Smashwords store and on your book page. I’ll provide ideas on
how to leverage our Coupon Manager tool later on in Tip #58.

12.
Promotional Widgets

Widgets are image-based
advertisements for your book. You and your readers can create
beautiful customizable widgets for your book. These widgets can be
placed on web sites and blogs to advertise your book. You’ll find
our widget builder on your Smashwords book page below the shopping
cart. Here’s a link to the widget builder for my free ebook, The
Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success:
https://www.smashwords.com/books/widgets?bookId=145431

13. Search
Engine Visibility

Your Smashwords profile
page, book pages and online book samples are designed so search
engines can easily discover and index them. By publishing your book
on Smashwords, you’ll have dozens of inbound links to your pages
from the leading search engines. This allows prospective readers to
stumble across your book as they’re performing searches.

14.
Exclusive “Special Deals” Promotions

In 2017 Smashwords
introduced an exciting new automated merchandising feature at the
Smashwords store that showcases books on sale exclusively at
Smashwords. These books are included in a permanent home page
promotional feature that makes it easy for readers to search for
special deals.

Enrollment in this
feature is free and easy. Visit the Coupon Manager in your
Dashboard, create a coupon and then mark it as a public coupon
instead of a private coupon.

Several years ago, we
ran a series of author interviews at the Smashwords blog. At first,
I conducted the interviews, but I didn’t have enough time to
interview all of the authors I wanted to interview. I then hired a
former writer for Rolling Stone Magazine to interview our authors.
He was awesome, and he did a bunch of great interviews, but we still
couldn’t accommodate everyone.

This led us to create a
really cool tool called Smashwords Interviews. You’ll find it in
your Smashwords Dashboard.

This exclusive
author-marketing tool makes it easy to create, publish and promote a
self-interview. The interview helps readers and prospective readers
learn the story behind the author. It’s a lot of fun. Our system
will present you a series of optional questions you can answer, or
you can modify our questions or create your own. The resulting
interview is promoted on your author profile page at Smashwords.

16.
Embeddable YouTube Videos

If you publish videos
on YouTube, you can embed them in both your profile page and your
book pages. This is great for book trailers or you in front of the
camera talking about your book. Video offers you a chance to engage
the senses of the prospective reader and entice them to sample and
purchase your book.

17. Book tagging

We realize even our
extensive hardwired book categories at Smashwords can’t describe
all books, so we allow you as the author or publisher to add
supplemental tags or keywords. These tags help describe your book
and make it easier to connect with prospective readers. The book
tags you enter help people discover you when they do a book search
from a search engine like Google, or from the Smashwords home page
search box. We also use these keywords for the next tool.

18. Tag Cloud

Each time you upload a
new book, you can attach up to one dozen supplemental keywords to
make your book more discoverable at the Smashwords Store. These
keywords then form what’s called a “tag cloud,” which offers
readers another way to discover books of interest. The keyword tags
for each book appear on that book’s Smashwords book page. On your
author or publisher profile page will appear an aggregate list of
keywords for all of your books. By clicking on a keyword in the
cloud, the reader is presented with all of the books that match that
tag.

19. Other
books by this Author or Publisher

When you publish
multiple books on Smashwords, you amplify the opportunity for readers
to discover you and your works. If a reader is browsing one book
page, they’ll see a link that reads, “Also by this author” or
“Also by this publisher.”

20.
Integration with Social Media Sites

Social media is all
about ordinary people having conversations online and sharing
information and interests. Social media turbocharges word of mouth
marketing.

On each book page at
Smashwords, you’ll notice links to popular social media sites such
as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. By clicking on this link, you or
your readers can share your book with friends. Each time someone
clicks on one of these links, they’re promoting your book by
building a virtual pathway (a hyperlink) that leads back to your book
page.

21. Smashwords
Affiliate Partners Program

The Smashwords
Affiliate program provides incentive to third party web sites, blogs
and affiliate marketers to link to and promote your books. Your
readers can be affiliates too. Affiliates receive a commission in
exchange for all book sales they help generate. As a Smashwords
author or publisher, your books are automatically enrolled to benefit
from this program.

22. Exclusive
Site-wide Promotions

A few times each year
Smashwords offers exclusive promotions at the Smashwords Store. The
most well known promotion is Read an Ebook Week, which usually
occurs during the second week of March. Another popular promotion is
our annual July Summer/Winter Sale (because it’s summer for
our Northern hemisphere customers, and winter for those in the
Southern hemisphere). In December 2017 we kicked off a new annual
promotion called the Smashwords End of Year Sale.

With
each of the promotions, you can enroll your books at different
discount levels, and we promote your books within a special
promotional catalog on the home page. These are collaborative
promotions because the more authors who participate, the more readers
are driven into the sale to discover other great books by
participating authors.

23. Promotion on
Smashwords Satellites

Smashwords Satellites
are a collection of about two dozen specialized micro-sites operated
by Smashwords. Readers can browse the most recently released
Smashwords ebooks by category and topic. For example, some of the
satellites are labeled “Ebooks for Kids,” “Biography Ebooks”
and “Free Poetry Ebooks.”

The Satellites offer
experimental book discovery interfaces that make it easier for
customers to discover and sample books of interest. Listing on the
satellites is automatic based on book category, length and price.
For a complete listing of Satellites, visit
http://www.smashwords.com/labs.

24. Access to
retailer merchandising promotions

If you walk into a
physical bookstore, the first books you see are on the front tables
or in endcaps where you’ll find featured books. Since these are
the first books you see, and they’re recommended by the bookseller,
you’re more likely to pick them up and purchase them - as opposed
to others buried deeper in the store, sitting spine out on a shelf.

The featured books are
selected by the merchandising managers of the stores. Often,
publishers pay money to the bookstore, or to the bookstore chain, to
have their books featured in these prime locations. In the ebook
realm, stores also have merchandising managers that select books for
features on their home pages. Visit the home page of iBooks, Barnes
& Noble, Kobo, and Amazon and you’ll see featured books.
Unlike with physical stores, the author or the publisher doesn’t
pay for these features.

How does the online
retailer select which books will receive feature promotion? It’s
usually a collaborative curation effort. The merchandising team
features books they’re confident will please their customers.
Since retailers can’t read every book, they use other signals to
identify the most promising reader-pleasers. These signals may
include the author’s past sales track record in their store, the
quality of the ebook’s cover image, the number of accumulated
preorders for the ebook, or the recommendation from a publisher or a
distributor.

This is where
Smashwords comes in. As a distributor, Smashwords has a unique
vantage point. We can track your actual sales from across our retail
and library distribution network. We can spot breakout books early
because we’re looking at aggregated sales of a title or aggregated
preorder accumulation, across multiple sales channels. We leverage
this data to provide merchandising recommendations to our retail and
library partners.

By distributing with
Smashwords, you’re eligible to receive this merchandising promotion
and the benefits that come from it, if you earn it. To keep things
fair and impartial, we base our recommendations on the metrics
retailers value most – the author’s historical track record,
preorder accumulation and aggregate sales across our distribution
network. Every week dozens of Smashwords authors receive this
incredible merchandising benefit at no cost. Our retailers and
library partners appreciate our recommendations because they know
they’re based upon actual audited performance data.

This also means that
your strong sales at one retailer – say iBooks or Kobo – can help
you get merchandising love at another retailer.

25. Free Author
Education Resources

Knowledge is power.
Knowledge is what separates self-published professionals from
self-published amateurs. I want to help you learn to publish like a
professional. The secret to professional publishing is best
practices.

At Smashwords, we
invest significant resources to develop free educational tools to
teach you professional publishing best practices.

This Smashwords Book
Marketing Guide is one such free resource. My new SMART AUTHOR
podcast is another such resource.

When you’re ready to
publish your book, download the free Smashwords Style Guide.
With over 600,000 downloads and counting, it’s probably the world’s
most popular ebook for how to professionally format and design an
ebook.

This 2018 edition of
the Smashwords Book Marketing Guide offers a checklist of 65
book marketing tips.

The tips are organized
under two primary sections, Foundation-Building and Promotion. Each
section and its sub-sections are organized to assist writers at all
stages of their publishing journey.

As you’ll soon learn,
this is no ordinary checklist. I don’t just recommend what you
should do; I try to explain why you should do it. These tips form a
mosaic of interlocking and interdependent components that work
together to take your marketing to the next level.

We’ll tackle
Foundation-Building first.

Foundation-Building

All great buildings and
all great enterprises are built on strong foundations designed to
stand the test of time.

Your marketing program
requires a strong foundation as well.

What are these
foundational elements? In this section on foundation-building, we’ll
look at author brand-building, knowledge-building, platform-building,
and distribution.

To illustrate the
importance of foundation-building, I’ll share some wisdom I learned
from my mom many years ago. My mom is a master gardener. When I was
growing up I’d often help her plant her fruit trees. She’d hand
me a pick and shovel and tell me where to dig the holes.

I remember one day I
was working through some difficult soil. It was almost as hard as
concrete. After considerable back-breaking effort, I dug a hole that
was big enough to accommodate the roots of her baby tree.

A tree’s root system
is its foundation. It’s what nourishes the tree and prevents it
from falling over. With a healthy root system, a tree grows stronger
and faster as it grows larger.

My mom took one look at
my little hole and shook her head. She told me to make the hole
bigger. She said, “If you plant a $15.00 tree in a $5.00 hole, you
get a $5.00 tree.” That lesson has always stuck with me.

In other words, without
a proper foundation, you’ll squander your potential. You need to
think beyond your current state and visualize how you want to grow in
the future.

Most indie authors
launch their first book without giving their foundation proper
consideration. This undermines their potential to stand tall and
rise above the crowd. A tree is stuck with the hole you give it.

Book marketing is more
forgiving. Although it’s ideal to get your foundational elements
in place before you launch your first book, the good news is
that it’s never too late to reinforce your foundation.

Whether you’re
preparing to launch your first book or your 50th, these
foundation-building tips will put your marketing on a more solid
footing.

Author
Brand-Building

Tip 1 – Visualize your author brand

The number one driver
of book sales is when readers seek out the books of authors they
know, trust and admire.

As the author, you are
the brand. Before you start marketing your books, you should first
visualize what you want your brand to represent.

What is your intention?
I’m not talking about your intention to sell a lot of books or
reach a lot of readers. We all share that intention.

I’m talking about
something bigger. Something more important. Because your book is
important. What mark do you want to leave on the world with your
books? What is your legacy?

Visualize the
experience readers can expect from your books. How do you want
readers to think of you?

Think of your favorite
restaurant. There was a time when you tried it for the first time,
and because it was enjoyable you returned to it again. And then you
returned again and again. Each time the restaurant met or exceeded
your expectations, it earned greater trust and loyalty from you. You
take your friends there and recommend it to everyone you know.

Now imagine a
restaurant you once loved, but then something changed and you never
returned. Maybe you received rude service, or found a hair in the
food, or you got food poisoning. That restaurant squandered your
trust. You warn your friends to avoid it.

Author brand operates
under the same dynamic. You must guard and cultivate your author
brand. Your author brand can be found at the intersection of who you
are and where you want to want to go.

There are two aspects
to author brand-building. The first is awareness, and the second is
perception.

Throughout the course
of your marketing, you’ll deliver both implicit and explicit
messages to prospective readers. These messages convey information
to the reader. Think of these messages as promises.

You will make promises
to readers in the form of your book cover, your book title, your book
description, your book categorization, and every other aspect of your
marketing.

You must deliver on the
promises you make when the reader reads the book.

Even if you’re
already a New York Times or USA Today bestseller, your awareness
building and trust building is never complete. There are still
millions of readers out there who haven’t heard of you and haven’t
read you. They therefore don’t know you, don’t trust you and
will not read you. You must attract their attention and win them
over. At the same time, you must continue to meet or exceed the
expectations of loyal readers for whom you’ve already built
awareness and trust.

As you work your way
through the marketing tips that follow, always ask yourself how you
can implement the tip to cultivate greater awareness, greater reader
satisfaction and greater trust.

Tip 2 – Practice ethical marketing

Ethics and honesty are
essential to successful book marketing. If you cut corners, you’ll
sully your author brand. Without ethics and honesty, it’s
impossible to build reader trust.

We’ve all seen or
read authors who promised one thing but delivered another. We
remember those authors for the wrong reasons.

We’ve all heard
stories of authors who cut ethical corners, like paying shills to
give them glowing reviews. We’ve all heard of horrible authors who
have carpet-bombed other authors’ books with one-star reviews.
Don’t be vile.

The publishing industry
is rife with unsavory authors, publishers and book marketers who cut
ethical corners, make promises they can’t keep, and who harm others
for personal gain.

If a reader reads your
book and feels your marketing misled them, the reader will seek their
revenge in the form of a scathing review and negative word of mouth.

You have the
opportunity to be different. Be the author who deserves admiration
and trust.

In my 30 years in the
business world, my personal motto has always been, “If you always
tell the truth, you never have to remember what you told people.”
I hold to this credo like religion, and it has served me well.

I’m sure there will
be skeptics out there who think this approach to ethics and truth
telling is naïve. They might argue that if others are lying and
cheating, they should too.

Here’s a promise I
can make to you: Karma will always reap its revenge.

Tip 3 – Act professional

As a self-published
author, you have the choice to act like an amateur or a professional.

Act professional.

If your book cover
looks homemade or if your book description is littered with typos,
you will project to readers that you’re an amateur. Such
sloppiness sends a message that you’re a clueless newbie, your
writing sucks and you don’t respect your reader’s time or money.

This may sound like
common sense, or sound like someone else’s problem, yet I see these
issues all of the time. We will all make mistakes. It takes a keen
sense of self-awareness and open-mindedness to recognize the
mistakes.

Publish like a pro.
Promote like a pro.

Tip 4 – Be a nice person

If you or your
marketing come across as mean, disrespectful or annoying, you will
scare prospective readers away.

It’s in your selfish
best interest to be a nice person.

It takes a village to
publish, promote and sell books. Publishing is a people business.

If you’re new to
publishing, the industry might feel as if it’s comprised of
thousands of faceless participants. I promise you the longer you’re
in the business, the more wonderful people you will meet and the
smaller the industry will feel.

Your marketing will
touch thousands of people who have the power to open doors or close
them.

Who are these powerful
people of whom I speak? They’re readers. They’re publishers,
retailers, distributors, book marketing firms, literary agencies,
bloggers, and major media outlets. They’re fellow authors,
editors, book designers, formatters, and cover designers. Every
single one of these people – even if they aren’t a target reader
for your books – has the power to elevate you or harm you.

As you put yourself and
your books out there, these people will form impressions about you.

Why then is it so
common to see foul-tempered indie authors publicly trashing entire
swaths of the publishing industry? You’ve probably seen well-known
indies trash publishers, literary agents, fellow authors, retailers,
distributors, or the media. Don’t be stupid.

No one likes mean
people. No one wants to help mean people. You can still find
success as an obnoxious SOB, but you’ll find more success by
showing kindness, humility and respect.

Be the person who
brings sunshine, rainbows and happiness to the party. I’m not
asking you to be fake. Just don’t pee in the pool.

Several years ago at
the Smashwords blog, we interviewed New York Times bestseller
Jonathan Maberry. We asked him how indie authors could best utilize
social media to promote their work and their author brand. He shared
this advice, which I hope you’ll take to heart:

“So, what do you put out there? Think about a party. If there’s
someone who is bitching and moaning and someone else who’s getting
folks to laugh and loosen up, which way do you drift? If a kid in a
playground is constantly bitching about the quality of the toys, and
another kid has turned a cardboard box into a sideshow funhouse,
who’s getting more attention? Who’s going to be remembered in a
positive way?

And, even if you are a naturally cranky, snarky, sour-tempered
pain in the ass, for God’s sake share that with your therapist or
priest. When you go online to promote yourself and therefore your
products, try not to actually scare people off your lawn.”

One day, if you work
hard and if fate permits, you will become a wildly successful author.
Your author brand will be known far and wide, and fellow writers
will look to you for inspiration.

As you climb the ladder
of success I want you to pause, reach behind you and extend a helping
hand to your fellow authors. Your success is their success, and
their success is yours. A journey shared is more enriching than a
journey alone.

If you find the
Smashwords Book Marketing Guide helpful to your journey,
please don’t keep it a secret and share it with your fellow
writers.

Knowledge Building

Knowledge is power.
It’s not enough that you have the tools of professional publishing.
You must learn how to wield them to achieve your strategic goals.

Every author needs to
learn publishing best practices and stay abreast of trends.

The challenge is time
management.

With the rise of
self-publishing over the last ten years, we’ve seen an entire new
industry sprout up dedicated to serving the knowledge needs of indie
authors.

Many of these experts
have great information to share, but at a certain point you begin to
feel like you’re spending all of your time chasing someone else’s
tail. That new shiny object that’s working this month may not work
the month after. Some of these experts have a vested interest in
making publishing appear more complicated than it needs to be.

I’ve always guided
our authors to focus on evergreen best practices. These are the
essential best practices that will work great today, and will still
work great ten years from now.

Authors often give best
practices short shrift, as if they’re common sense. Your
opportunity isn’t just to implement these best practices, it’s to
constantly iterate and improve your implementation of them.

In the five tips that
follow, I’ll recommend free knowledge-building resources that will
give you the intelligence you need to pursue your book marketing
campaigns more effectively. These resources will help you stay
focused on the most important best practices and trends, without
sucking up all of your time.

Tip 6 – Subscribe to the Smart Author Podcast

In October 2017 I
introduced the Smart Author podcast. A podcast is an audio recording
you can access over any computer or mobile device.

Think of the Smart
Author podcast as a free masterclass in ebook publishing. It guides
you step-by-step from the very basics of ebook publishing to more
advanced best practices.

The podcast focuses on
evergreen best practices. It offers practical, no-nonsense advice on
how to make your books more discoverable, more desirable and more
enjoyable to readers.

Smart Author is
available at Apple
Podcasts and everywhere fine podcasts are found.
Visit Smashwords.com/podcast
where you can listen over the web, access full text transcripts or
view a full listing of all the podcast directories that carry it.

Tip 7 – Join a local writer’s club or critique group

Authorship at times can
feel like a lonely pursuit. For those of us who are natural
introverts, sometimes we need a kick in the butt to get out of the
house and meet people who share common passions.

Join a local writer’s
club or critique group. It will change your life.

Almost every community
around the globe has local writers groups that get together once a
month to hear expert guest speakers. You’ll learn about the craft
and business of authorship.

There are also many
genre-specific national and international writers groups that have
local chapters. You’ll find groups for romance, thrillers,
mysteries, non-fiction, Christian, horror, sci-fi and fantasy, and
more. Whatever your writing interest, you’ll find a writing group
that’s right for you.

If you live in
California, check out the California Writers Club with multiple
chapters around the state.

Outside the US in other
English-speaking countries, there are many great groups and clubs in
the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

If you live too far
from the nearest writing group (and even if you don’t), check out
the Alliance of Independent Authors, an international group based in
the UK that’s dedicated to helping self-published authors publish
like professionals. They hold several free online conferences a year
where you’ll hear from expert speakers. Check them out at
https://www.allianceindependentauthors.org/.

Tip 8 – Subscribe to the Smashwords Blog

I started the
Smashwords Blog in 2008, the same year we launched Smashwords.
You’ll find it at http://blog.smashwords.com. I blog about news,
trends and best practices of interest to the indie author community.

The blog has an option
to sign up to receive future posts via email, so you never miss
another post. I respect your inbox if you subscribe. I NEVER share
your email address with anyone or use it for any other purpose.

Tip 9 – Read The Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success

Several years ago I
published The Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success, which
identifies over 30 best practices of the most successful ebook
authors. Like all of my ebooks on the topic of ebook publishing,
it’s available for free download at all major retailers. It’s
also available directly from Smashwords at
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/145431.

Tip 10 – Check out the Smashwords Survey

Each year I publish the
Smashwords Survey, a comprehensive research report that provides
authors a treasure trove of data.

The 2017 Survey shares
insights about the top fiction and non-fiction categories, and the
pricing sweet spots to maximize readership and earnings. You’ll
also learn data about box sets, series, preorders, and the optimal
word counts to maximize sales.

Episode
7 of the Smart Author podcast explores the 2017
Smashwords Survey. You can download the full 2017 survey at the
Smashwords Blog
–http://blog.smashwords.com/2017/06/smashwords-survey-2017.html.
You’ll find the prior five Surveys at Slideshare.net at
https://www.slideshare.net/smashwords.

Platform Building

You’ve probably heard
the term “author platform,” but may not know what it means. A
platform is your ability to reach your audience.

If you have 500 friends
on Facebook and 1,000 on Twitter, that’s your platform. If you do
a lot of public speaking, that’s a platform. If you’re a
television personality with daily viewership of hundreds of thousands
of people, that’s an incredible platform. If you have the ability
to earn yourself free press coverage, that’s a platform too.

Your audience is
everywhere.

The next eight tips
will help you build your platform, so you can deliver your marketing
message directly to those who most want to hear it.

Tip 11 – Join HARO, Help-A-Reporter-Online

Every day thousands of
journalists across the globe are looking to interview experts for
their stories. Journalists love to interview authors because authors
are credible subject-matter experts and good communicators. For the
author it’s free publicity for their author brand and their books.

Because you’re an
author, you’re probably qualified to serve as an expert on various
topics related to your books.

HARO – short for
Help-A-Reporter-Online – is a free service that emails you a
thrice-daily summary of what reporters are working on now, and the
types of experts they seek to interview.

Subscribe to the
service at helpareporter.com. I’ve been recommending them for
almost ten years. Later in this book in the Deep Dives section,
I’ve devoted an entire section to how to earn free press coverage.
Study it carefully before you start contacting reporters. To read my
original review of the service on the Smashwords blog, go to
http://blog.smashwords.com/2008/09/haro-great-publicity-tool-for.html
.